Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by artagnon on Sunday May 05, 2019 @12:21AM
(#19831137)
I agree that it's necessary to do exercises in order to understand the subject, but I disagree that you need to have them checked by someone else -- in many cases, you should be check it for yourself, honestly.
Beyond the junior undergraduate level, computation-style problems go away, and you're just left with exercises that ask you to prove a certain something. It takes a long time to build up a sufficient degree of rigor, but it happens eventually -- I did go get some of my proofs checked by serious Mathematicians at some point, and it turned out that my intuition wasn't far behind.
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by _hardwaregeek on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:19AM
(#19833215)
The main reason you'd want proofs to be checked by someone else, at least initially, is to get a feel for writing clear, rigorous and tight proofs. Much as a novice programmer should have their code reviewed, a novice mathematician needs to have their math reviewed for common mistakes and pitfalls.
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by agumonkey on Sunday May 05, 2019 @03:43AM
(#19831675)
Weren't there people in history who managed a sound level of self testing ? I understand it's super hard to be non biased and not claiming victory when you think you did a few checks.
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by jqgatsby on Sunday May 05, 2019 @09:49AM
(#19832789)
Wait, "redefine derivatives to be based on multiplication"? That sounds really interesting, could you please expand on that?
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by _hardwaregeek on Sunday May 05, 2019 @11:15AM
(#19833202)
It's a pretty interesting topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplicative_calculus
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by theonemind on Saturday May 04, 2019 @11:32PM
(#19830958)
Math tends to bug me because "proving" theorems seems to come from convincing arguments, but we have enough computation power at this point that we should reduce them to mechanical/machine verification and then just run them and know.
With enough rigor, you don't need to "convince" anyone--a machine can verify it.
Re:Self-Taught Mathematician; an Impossibility?
by BigFish12 on Sunday May 05, 2019 @12:32AM
(#19831183)
To be rigorous you would need to prove that the machine verified it correctly. Good luck doing that. Also theorem proving is only good for basic rudimentary maths, and not abstract state of the art math research.
Second, it's quite easy to convince yourself that you understand a topic. I don't know what it is about math, but there's so many people, myself included, who fall into the trap of thinking they understand a topic, when in fact they don't at all. For instance, there's a multitude of people who can recite verbatim the quadratic formula, or the power rule for differentiation. But ask them to explain why this is true, or give them variants on the power rule (what if we redefine derivatives to be based on multiplication? How does the power rule change?), and they won't be able to give you satisfactory answers. This goes back to my first point; the only way to truly understand math is to do problems and have them checked.